About the Book
About the Book
“Chesterton makes one despair. I have been studying St. Thomas all my life and I could never have written such a book.” — Etienne Gilson
“He was a Christian liberator. Like a beneficent bomb, he blew out of the Church a quantity of stained glass of a very poor period, and let in gusts of fresh air, in which the dead leaves of doctrine danced with all the energy and indecorum of our Lady’s Tumbler.” — Dorothy Sayers
Eight hundred or so years ago, two great saints pointed to two great ways to the heart of the Church’s mission. St. Francis of Assisi showed a new way of living the Faith, while St. Thomas Aquinas showed a new way of knowing the Faith. Each man met many obstacles in his own time and meets even more in ours. But should these two ways ever be rediscovered and established at the center of cultural life, man would be well on the path to transformation in Christ. For it is only the kind of religious, moral, and intellectual conversion pointed to by Francis and Thomas that leads to spiritual communion and the consequent earthly solidarity for which we so desperately long. Absent these conversions, all secular proposals to achieve even a measure of solidarity will fall hopelessly short.
Chesterton begins St. Thomas Aquinas with a look at these two saints, both part of the “great medieval movement” that was to change the course of the West. Turning to Thomas’s appropriation of Aristotle, Chesterton notes that “once Christ had Risen, it was inevitable that Aristotle should rise again.” The synthesis between Christianity and Aristotle could only strengthen the believer’s affirmation of the reality and goodness of created being; and also a strange kind of interconnectedness where “the study of the humblest fact will lead to the study of the highest truth.” Chesterton reveals the marvelous clarity of Thomas’s mind and highlights “the intense rightness of his sense of the relation between the mind and the real thing outside the mind.” He writes: “The essence of the Thomist common sense is that two agencies are at work; reality and the recognition of reality; and their meeting is a sort of marriage.”
This book is a splendid introduction to both Thomas the man and the significance of his work for his own time and ours. “Its aim will be achieved, if it leads those who have hardly even heard of St. Thomas Aquinas to read about him in better books.” That’s a fine parting thought from Chesterton himself, though no less a scholarly light than Etienne Gilson remarked that “I consider it as being without possible comparison the best book ever written on St. Thomas. Nothing short of genius can account for such an achievement.”